This week, guest writer, deep thinker, and culture developer @Robert Tenney writes about the framework for building a high performing business culture.

Most of my work experience comes from working on start-ups. One company sold for 2.3 billion dollars. Some merged with other companies. And more than a few crashed and burned. It’s a career that has left me with both beautiful memories and well-deserved, smooth-worn scars that I wouldn’t trade for anything in the world. 

Each company I worked with had its own brand of challenges. But it seemed to me the challenges were not novel to that particular company. These were commonplace issues resulting from the same kinds of decisions. Different scenarios, but the same mistakes resulting from the same faulty reasoning. Over and over again.

Not always were the decisions bad. More often than not, we obliterated obstacles. But similarly, the decisions that repeatedly led to success were based on similar reasoning. Different scenarios, but repeated success. Over and over again.

Here are some examples (you likely have had similar experiences yourself):

• One company changed its sales compensation plan from tiered thresholds with commission bumps at each tier to a flat commission rate for every sale. Sales doubled the following month with the lowest CPA to date.

• Another company decided that they were no longer going to sell their product through the 500+ “Mom-n-Pop” shops in their partner network, deciding to sell solely through big businesses (it was “better for the brand”). The company lost 25% of total sales by shutting off the small partner’s ability to sell. They dropped twenty dimes to pick up a dollar because they didn’t want to be represented by the small fry.

Similar decisions are made over and over again,  made for the same reasons, over and over again. With similar results, over and over again. 

Given I had a vested interest in the success of these companies, I was determined to find out what reasoning consistently resulted in demonstrably good decisions.

I won’t go too in-depth here on how I came to these conclusions (coming soon). But in essence, I found that individual values, organizational cultures, leadership techniques, and general business management styles fell into three paradigms. 

They were either Fear-based, Respect-based, or Honor-based paradigms.

What is the difference?

The difference between Fear, Respect, and Honor is the difference between:

• Accountability, Responsibility, and Stewardship. 
• Coercion, Competiton, and Collaboration. 
• Intimidation, Incentivising, and Inspiration.
• Sympathy, Empathy, and Compassion
• Command, Assign, and Challenge
• Burden, Duty, and Opportunity

Often, each group of words is considered synonyms. Practically interchangeable.

But at their core are key differences. And in that difference lay all the power.

So, what’s the difference?

Fear-based companies rely on:

Quotas and Thresholds

Annual Reviews

Performance Improvement Plans

Command and Control

Urgency

Respect-based organizations leverage:

Competitions

Incentives

Titles

Authority

Compensation

Hierarchy

Prioritization

Honor-based organizations value:

Stewardship

Values

Intelligence

Commitments

Experiences

Service

Collaboration

Fear relies on threats and scarcity to get a team to deliver.

Respect relies on calling out the relative value of each team member to get a team to deliver.

Honor relies on the volition of each team member in order to get the team to deliver.